Extreme Dedication to Journalism Brings Fame, but Consumes Body and Soul

After the frequent deaths of prominent journalists (Antun Masle, Vladimir Matijanić, Mislav Bago), several long-time readers of Lider called or sent messages asking what is happening. And how to navigate the sea of comments that flooded social media. So here are a few sentences that may help some outside the industry in seeking answers.

The first specificity of journalism is that it is public. What a journalist does on that day is visible to thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of people. Imagine, each of you who is not a journalist, that what you did that day is seen not only by your superiors and some colleagues but that it can also be evaluated and judged by your neighbors, acquaintances, and strangers. That everyone knows that you signed a contract with a new buyer of your products/services on Wednesday. All great! But on Thursday, it happens that a long-time client thanked you for the collaboration. You were not as successful as the previous day. And so day by day, when you leave work, you encounter people knowing that they know whether you wrote an excellent or average 'text' that day.

Now someone will say: 'Well, actors and musicians are constantly in the public eye and judgment.' True. But they mostly reproduce what someone else has written or composed. Journalists do not have the privilege of learning a role or a song once and then performing it dozens or hundreds of times. A journalist must constantly write a new 'drama' or compose a new 'song'. A journalist must be original every day.

Three Types of Journalists

Well, now, there are, simply put, three types of journalists. The first are those who play 'for points'. Their approach is to produce a correct piece every day. You do not show great ambition, you do not tackle the most attractive topics, so the public does not expect too much. And that is O.K. Every editorial office needs more modest players who will reliably perform their role.

The second extreme is journalists who from the beginning of their careers do not want to play for points, but something drives them to try to win by knockout every day. They approach every topic as if it were the last. They invest enormous energy to create an extraordinary piece. They enjoy briefly when they succeed, but since journalistic fame lasts until the next edition or show, they start a new fight the next day that they want to finish by knockout. Because they have accustomed the audience to that. It brings fame, but it consumes body and soul.

In my several decades of journalistic and editorial career, I have known many knockout artists and worked with them. They could not help themselves. Something drove them to extreme challenges and efforts. Of course, it is impossible to prove that there is an above-average number of those who left too early (there are those who worked leisurely and left in their forties), but that is the impression.

Between point collectors and knockout artists are colleagues who have managed to resist the maximum satisfaction of their journalistic impulse and who have found their ratio between texts/contributions that are done professionally and those topics they take on with full zeal and expend great energy until they create something above average. Something that satisfies their ego (I do not know a seasoned journalist who does not have it, whether they hide it or not) and after whose publication they do not regret staying in this difficult profession. This is an approach in which one tries to balance between the criterion that a journalist is evaluated only by the quantity of top-notch texts and the approach that, in fact, it is equally important how good your worst text is.

Like a Cake Without Whipped Cream

Knockout artists under the pressure of success and fame often become dissatisfied with the attitude of their superiors towards them. Sometimes rightly so, but sometimes not. So they start moving from one editorial office to another. This further tears them apart and consumes them. Then there are the challenges of being close to sources of important information without unintentionally becoming someone’s spokesperson. Then one has to deal with those who have been written about in a negative context…

Knockout journalists are invaluable to every editorial office, every publisher. They are often not pleasant to work with, they can be demanding and stubborn. But just as a football team needs not only good defensive and midfield players but also excellent forwards, so do media need players in the 'forward' position. Without them, the media does not have that whipped cream on the cake. Therefore, as difficult as it may be, editors and publishers need to pay extra attention to these dedicated journalists. The journalistic life has always been hard. The internet, the speed of the world’s life, and the expectations of the audience today definitely consume journalists much more than before.